Salesforce on Rails has an interesting post on how you can get the meta data for standard objects into the Force.com IDE for easy manipulation of its configuration via the Meta Data API capabilities built into the IDE.

After doing some research, I found the first post to show how to include custom fields on standard objects using Eclipse and the Force.com IDE. It turns out that JonP was the original poster, as noted by many others, but he first wrote about it on Febr…